“A PROPHET OF THE SOUL” 
forces of the earth went their round of ceaseless 
change for untold ages without escaping from the 
grip of mechanical necessity in which they were 
held; then there came a time when the spell was 
broken and the current of life arose. We have to 
speak of the event in this anthropomorphic way, as 
if it were an event, as if there were discontinuity 
somewhere, as if the creative spirit began its work as 
we begin ours. But evidently life did not begin in 
our human, practical sense, any more than the line 
we call a circle begins, or any more than the sphere 
has ends and boundaries. Our logical faculties, cast 
in the moulds of our experience, fail to grasp these 
problems. Life 7s, and, in some inscrutable way, 
always has been, and always will be, because it is 
one with the cosmic spirit. 
IV 
One phase of this new world which Bergson’s 
“Creative Evolution” opens to us is this play and 
interplay of spirit and matter, or this struggle for 
the mastery, or shall I say for the union between 
them, of which organic evolution is the drama — a 
real drama unfolding throughout the biologic ages, 
with vicissitudes, failures, and successes. We see 
the current of life, spirit, consciousness, making its 
way through matter, struggling with it, hampered 
and retarded by it, as a stream wearing its channel 
through the soil wastes itself and is delayed, divided, 
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